Resource estimation and task scheduling for multithreaded reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

Reconfigurable computing is an emerging paradigm of research that offers cost-effective solutions for computationally intensive applications through hardware reuse. There is a growing need in this domain for techniques to exploit parallelism inherent in the target application and to schedule the parallelized application. This paper proposes a method to estimate the optimal number of resources through critical path analysis while keeping resource utilization near optimal. We also propose an algorithm to optimally schedule the parallel threads of execution in linear time. Our algorithm is based on the idea of enhanced partial critical path (ePCP) and handles memory latencies and reconfiguration overheads. Results obtained show the effectiveness of our approach over other critical path based methods.